Skepticism

EVENTS

I get email

There is a shifting pattern of spam email that I get. A while back, it was practically non-stop gay porn; I commented on this a while back, and laughed it off, which apparently annoyed the people who’d been sending it to me. I think they expected me to be stressed and conflicted and angry at getting photographs of muscular young men with large penises, but really…it doesn’t bother me at all. So lately the supply of hunky naked men posing in my in-box has all but dried up.

Instead, my previous criticisms have prompted a flood of commercial spam from middle eastern sites, and the malicious spammers have switched to signing me up for right-wing newsletters. It’s as if they think I don’t know how to use the delete key, or how to create spam filters. Usually they’re destroyed on sight, but one caught my eye — it was talking about a new theory of evolution.

You might be wondering what the old theories of evolution are. One is creationism, the biblical story; another is intelligent design creationism; and the third is the scientific theory of evolution, which he also calls the “particle-clang theory”, that it’s all about particles randomly banging together. According to this email, all three of those are wrong, and the true answer is something completely different. Are you ready for it?

The answer may be found in a fourth alternative, a transdimensional theory that says we weren’t exactly dropped off; but that we walked in from another dimension. We know from watching the Morph sensation that I have written about extensively on my site www.stuartwilde.com that this world is not always solid.

When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it. You can put your hand up in it and your hand will dematerialize. It sounds extraordinary but we have seen that phenomena more than a thousand times. I’ve also seen humans completely dematerialize in front of my eyes and not reappear for ten minutes or more. I’ve done it myself with others watching. This phenomenon of dematerialization has now been seen by me and others over a thousand times, since I first discovered it in the spring of 2001. So we have become convinced.

One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize, when a golden ring of light formed on the lawn. It appeared from nowhere. There was no obvious source to the light or any beam shining down from above. It was just there. So I told my mate to walk out and stand in the ring of gold, and he did that and ‘blip’ he was gone. He came back into view a while later, but when he was gone, he was totally out of sight. I could clearly see the distant trees through the area where he had been standing.

The other dimensions I write about, that Paul Dirac postulated (1930) exist as antiparticle worlds, and seem to our perception to be placed at arm’s length to us. They are close, not out in space a million miles away. So if a human can dematerialize and walk out of here, then it might also be possible, that at some point in ancient history, humans walked into this 3-D world from another more rarefied dimension close at hand, the walk-in theory might be possible. It’s certainly food for thought.

Are Humans Older than our Universe?

The problem with all the other theories of origins of man is that they look at the earth and humans as solid. Once you realize that the planet’s solidity is an illusion and that it also exists in a non-solid, hazy-wave, transdimensional form, then it is perfectly feasible that a human could walk out of a multi-dimensional, non-solid, close-by hyperspace into the 3-D earth plane and become solid flesh and blood once he or she got here.

Then particle-clang looks silly as the origins of our humanity and all of life on earth could well have begun in an eternal, twenty-six dimensional hyperspace that might have existed for trillions upon trillions of eons, before this universe came into being, just 13.8 billions years ago. It is probable that no modern scientist has ever seen the dematerialization of the human body so the Fourth Alternative would never have occurred to them.

Humans and the animals could be very old, much older than our universe. It is also very possible that our Universe is just one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of universes, that various human species have evolved in, over timeframes that are so astronomical in length, they boggle the mind.

Here below is a P.S. about the origins of man that I saw in the Mirror World as a vision.

The Origins of Man in the Mirror World-Aluna
Stuart Wilde

The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna. In the Aluna, there is a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found the mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that had been previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find others, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.

What is fascinating is that the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who wrote Food of the Gods, knew about the mushroom activation of human consciousness theory, but he did not consider the Fourth Alternative I have suggested, the walk-in theory discussed above.

He also believed humans evolved from a primitive state akin to automatons, but he did not say where those primitive beings came from, but he did suggest that they then took the mushrooms, and so they developed the self-aware consciousness that we know today.

I have no idea how we will ever prove the walk-in theory, because by its very nature it left no trace of what happened, but as creationism and evolutionism are mathematically ludicrous and open to question, it might be an idea to consider the possibility of walk-ins.

A sophisticated form of the intelligent design theory might be right in the end, as it doesn’t preclude walk-ins, and when dealing with other dimensions in hyper-space, one isn’t constrained by the tightness of a few billion years, that particle-clang theory asks us to believe in.

I reckon we walked in here just as the animals and the insects did, and that life is trillions-upon-trillions of eons older than our rather new universe.

Totally dingleberries with a big red clown nose on.

What always gets me about these loons isn’t their grand wacky theories of everything that explain absolutely nothing, but the casual asides: “I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize”. Right. OK. I would love to meet this guy, see him standing in front of me in all his lumpy solidity, and ask him to dematerialize for me. I suspect he has a nice patter of prepared excuses for why he can’t just do it right then.

We need new words! In the face of this sort of thing, terms such as “batshit”, “doolally”, “completely Finchley”, “stark staring bonkers”, “a whole hamper short of a picnic” and so forth, seem completely inadequate. Maybe these words will materialise from the 26th dimension if we concentrate hard enough on calling them?

I think that in order to see people dematerialize you have to be taking the right drugs. Not sure that they are

Well I’ve never tried any of the anticholinergics (e.g. datura) or GABA-A agonists (such as fly agaric), but both are said to be capable of producing hallucinations that are genuinely indistinguishable (by the subject) from reality.

I am starting to get a bit fed up with all this casual bat-ism. Bat guano has a noble history prior to the industrial production of fertilizers that is casually denigrated by the epithet bat-shit crazy.

You’d think if these guys were gonna announce to the world that they’re batshit crazy they could at least be original about it.

His transdimensional world sounds exactly like Fluidic Space from Star Trek, but he didn’t even have the sense to tell us about the super-powerful alien beings bent on our destruction that inhabit this dimension.

He’s using drugs from the 26th dimension. He is weaselshit crazy (yes, batshit doesn’t cover it anymore).

If you’ve ever driven in Montreal, you will understand how the natives of that city can suddenly dematerialize from one side of your car and then instantaneously appear on the other side. They don’t leave golden rings, though.

One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize, when a golden ring of light formed on the lawn. It appeared from nowhere. There was no obvious source to the light or any beam shining down from above. It was just there. So I told my mate to walk out and stand in the ring of gold, and he did that and ‘blip’ he was gone.

I think I’d have reacted differently, but admittedly I’m not from Montreal.

*thwumm*
“What the holy balls is that?”
“I’ve no idea, but it looks interesting. Go and stand in it.”
“Fuck off, you stand in it! I’ll be behind that wall over there!”

I say we should entertain the alternative theory that in those cases of momentary disappearances, the people Stuart saw were really cats. They are well known for being stubbornly invisible when you are looking for them, and then suddenly materialising out of thin air when you happen to open the fridge.

When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it.

I experience that phenomenon too, right before a migraine strikes. (visual aura)

Yup. And it makes people disappear too – you can have it block your visual focus. It’s annoying because you can see around it and your brain tries to fill in, but you can’t see what it is you’re focusing on – try reading that way.

When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it. You can put your hand up in it and your hand will dematerialize.

RE PZ’s former, sexier spam trands: Some people have all the luck. The little spam that gets to me only presumes I want to buy watches and vicodin.

All in all, though, I’m with scorpy1 in #31 – why waste a good crazy moment in a pedestrian email? The “golden ring of light” business sounds like the “Quell” game I’ve been playing on my nook…stuff goes in the ring and *bloop* appears elsewhere. Props to this writer for at least being entertaining!

it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it. You can put your hand up in it and your hand will dematerialize. It sounds extraordinary but we have seen that phenomena more than a thousand times. I’ve also seen humans completely dematerialize in front of my eyes and not reappear for ten minutes or more. I’ve done it myself with others watching. This phenomenon of dematerialization has now been seen by me and others over a thousand times, since I first discovered it in the spring of 2001.

pj @ 28
Yeah, I used to get migranes regularly during puberty. The 2 hour warning was when lotsa dots & other weirdness started happening with my vision. Generally it gave me time to hightail home and hide in a darkened room before the pain started!

How dare he misuse the name Morph. Morph was a cartoon character in a BBC Children’s program that encouraged them to do art, and showcased their work. It was stop-frame plasticine animation from the people who make Wallace and Gromit. Indeed I think it was their first big break.

“they then took the mushrooms, and so they developed the self-aware consciousness that we know today.”
And no vengeful god drove them out of their home? Well, that sure sounds a lot nicer than the garden of Eden story.

We need new words! In the face of this sort of thing, terms such as “batshit”, “doolally”, “completely Finchley”, “stark staring bonkers”, “a whole hamper short of a picnic” and so forth, seem completely inadequate. Maybe these words will materialise from the 26th dimension if we concentrate hard enough on calling them?

I totally agree with the need for a more expressive vocabulary, but “completely Finchley”? This seems to originate from an older Pharyngula post.
Sorry, whoever thinks that Finchley is anywhere near Barking is clearly “completely Upminster” – which is 8 stops past Barking. Try looking at a London Tube map.
A former resident of Finchley. No, I didn’t vote for Margaret Thatcher.

Well, as long as it’s science, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be considered. It’s every bit the equal of, “I say, that flagellum looks designed, let me calculate the chances that it would appear immediately in a bacterium.”

It’s an interesting question — where is the dividing line between being a crank and being mentally ill? Degree? Social stigma? Level of personal comfort? Level of personal preference?

There are no doubt forums and groups which would welcome this gentleman and his new theory on evolution. His acceptance would probably however be conditional on his willingness to then listen to everyone else’s own theories on evolution — such listening being done in a totally open and non-judgmental way, of course. Only the established materialist hegemony is the Enemy.

I’m afraid that my first thought on reading the details of the Transdimensional Theory of Evolution was not “oh, how can we get this poor guy to a psychologist?”

I’m afraid it was “hey, how can we get this stuff to the Discovery Institute?”

Well to be fair his beliefs are no more crazy than most religions, its just his church contains only one pope, priest and member (eat that Holy Trinity!).

Hallucinations would worry me personally but just becuase he appears to have had some doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dangerous. People have hallucinations all the time without stabbing people or runing around placing magnetic bombs under cars (or teleporting them there mentally).
I still wouldn’t like to be sharing a cabin with him on a boat trip but I might think differently if I got ot know him before hearing abvout his wacko stuff.

I love how this explains where humans (oh, I’m sorry, men, and probably women) came from in a nice, neat package. With the unexplained “being” festooning their bodies with shrooms. May as well be creationism, what?

One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize…

So, essentially, this person is saying;

“One night my friend and I were just killing time publicly demonstrating our amazing, reality-warping psychic powers that could at a stroke revolutionise our species’ understanding of science, like you do…

If he actually possessed such abilities he would be the biggest scientific news story in the history of the planet, and scientists from all across the world would be queuing up to try to fathom how this unprecedent ability functioned. Oddly enough, this isn’t the case.

I can’t imagine why…

Frankly PZ, even as a straight man with little use for it, you were better off with the gay porn.

A bad case of “floaters” in the eyes can cause some of this, but most of this is clearly an epic delusion. I agree with a previous poster, test him on this and all we get is excuses of the like that Depak Chopra would be proud of.

As I was reading this, like #20, I thought of Star Trek – “His transdimensional world sounds exactly like Fluidic Space from Star Trek”. I also thought of Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Number of the Beast”.
Here’s my theory – The poor guy had been watching Classic Star Trek after reading some Heinlein. He started feeling the pain of an oncoming migraine headache, so he smoked some weed, ate a few magic mushrooms, took a nap, and had the most realistic dream!
There – how about that for a scientific explanation for this guy’s batshittyness?

It is probable that no modern scientist has ever seen the dematerialization of the human body

So not completely cut off from reality. Perhaps merely Dagenham.

But I agree that he sounds as though he has been adventurous with the pyschotropics, has migraines or has undiagnosed visual problems. Or a combination. I used to get wicked migraines as a lad but they stopped in my late twenties. Recently I felt the precursor effects a couple of times and saw my GP who told me it could be a ‘painless migraine’, which I hadn’t realised was a thing.

Compared with his fellow delusionals he seems harmless, not hating on anybody and at least coherent within his delusion.

(Actually, could anyone with medical knowledge say whether or not this could symptomatic of a brain tumour? I hope the guy get medical attention soon.)

I too laughed out loud when he got to the bit about the shrooms. Love that he wrote his own punchline! But, then again, I’ve had psilocybin mushrooms twice, and never quite experienced the effects he described. (Though they did give me fairly intense stomach cramps. Not a pleasant sensation.)

And then I looked at generallerong’s (67) link to ocular migraines, and realized– oh whoa, I’ve had one of those! And I didn’t even realize it. A blurry spot in the middle of my vision that spread into a gradually expanding ring of blurriness before dissipating. It only happened the once, but I had no idea what it was. Interesting! Learn something new every day, etc.

So yes, it sounds to me like a combination of ocular migraines and psychedelics are the culprits for this particular New Theory. Who knew that was all it took to “discover” something so significant? And why am I bothering with grad school if it’s that easy?

First: He totally is a DIngleberry, as you say.
Second: DIngleberries exist.
Conclusion: His Theory is Troo!

Unless you are denying the existence of DIngleberries now, PZ? What an about-face! Aha!

Further evidence: His theory has something more. The young men in the Gay Porn lacked DIngleberries, didn’t they? They had no DIngleberries, but in his multidimensionalilitudinous bipartititude, he both is a DIngleberry and has a DIngleberry.

Aha! A-ha!!

…But seriously, on a truly disheartening note–he makes more sense than the creationists of all stripes and the IDiots, and they are everywhere and given credence.

Recently I felt the precursor effects a couple of times and saw my GP who told me it could be a ‘painless migraine’, which I hadn’t realised was a thing.

Yeah, I think it’s fairly common for people to get migraine auras without getting the actual migraines. I’ve also heard a possibly apocryphal story (though I don’t think it’s all that improbable) about a schizophrenic girl who didn’t realize it’s very rare to hear voices in your head — she thought her voices were normal and part of reality (if this is true, she was very fortunate to have benign voices; my understanding is that schizophrenia is not often that kind).

So maybe there’s a real possibility of people having migraine auras or a slight schizophrenic affect that are benign enough that the person remains functional but strong enough that the person does have a little bit of trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. Mix that in with psychedelics and you can see where this guy might be coming from assuming he’s sincere.

On the other hand, the hypothesis that he’s a con man preying on woo-heads is quite probable.

No, it doesn’t. Quantum tomatoes refers to a truly bizarre discussion in which I compared an idiots description of spiritual to dog piss and it went down hell from there. To quote Pharyngulawiki:

May be used to illustrate a troll’s self delusion, or to humiliate a Chopra troll. Originated on a “Why I am an Atheist” thread, where a spiritual/quantum troll engaged Father Ogvorbis, who mentioned that the troll’s forthcoming definition of “spiritual” would make good manure for his tomatoes. The troll proceeded to note that his definition would burn his tomatoes. Father O. asked if that meant if his ideas were undiluted dog urine. Through further discussion, the concept of quantum tomatoes arose as a means of humiliating the troll.

Sounds like the summer/winter transition in New England in 2010 and 2011. Instead of traditional New England autumns we had quantum superpositions of summer and winter states.

I’m starting to wonder if a part of my mind — a part hidden from me, that is — is creating creative typographical errors specifically for the amusement of this community: cases in point: Strumpet Solo, Tpyos, and now Quantumn tomatoes. If I can find what part of my mind is doing this, do I eliminate it through selective brain injury, or free that creativity for the greater evil of the horde?

Occasionally, especially after just waking up or if I’m bored and my mind is wandering, my vision gets ‘noisy’. I can see the floaters more clearly, I see movement that might be something like the blue field entoptic phenomenom, and I see “static”. Kind of like my brain isn’t filtering visual input like it should be. Does this have a name? Is it common?

In any case, I can see this being misinterpreted by someone with an… unusual mind.

“When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it.”

You’re experiencing what ophthalmologists refer to as floaters.

“One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize, when a golden ring of light formed on the lawn. It appeared from nowhere. There was no obvious source to the light or any beam shining down from above. It was just there. So I told my mate to walk out and stand in the ring of gold, and he did that and ‘blip’ he was gone. He came back into view a while later, but when he was gone, he was totally out of sight.”

I get the same effect sometimes just waking up, but much more pronounced when I pull an all nighter or only get a few hours of sleep. In particular, very noisy color patterns or textures (especially ugly industrial carpeting with lots of color but no patterning) start “buzzing” at me and floaters become very, very apparent. I’ve always assumed it is pretty normal. I don’t think you need to be the least bit worried about your sanity.

Unless of course you want to be. I would never dream of discouraging recreational insanity.

When will all the people learn that Timecube won and the Crazy Olympics are over?

This thread has definitely been won…!!!

eat that Holy Trinity!

That’s a Catholic sentiment.

“Particle clang theory” sounds vaguely Klingon to my ears.

In fact I think he was a character on ST:TOS.

Klaang was a character on ST:Enterprise.

(And as usual, I have no idea what the aa in his official name is supposed to have in common with the Klingon language. Poor Mark Okrand – invents an entire language, and the whole franchise fucking ignores him!)

Why, oh why, do the gods of spam send me little but Nigerian 419 scams and their congeners, with a sprinkling of genuine imitation watches and cheap ED meds? As an occasional commentator on Pharyngula, do I not deserve better?

PS: The scam-spams I get are ceaselessly inventive. The scammers are far from being stupid people. But with very few exceptions, perhaps one or two out of upwards of a thousand received in 2011, it’s immediately obvious that they are scams. My sympathy for those conned is not great; they clearly let their greed overrule their common sense.

@daniellavine: I assumed it was normal as well. I’m curious as to whether it’s more commonly noticeable in migraine sufferers, but there doesn’t seem to be much out there on it. Just some vague connections and case studies of migraine sufferers.

(And as usual, I have no idea what the aa in his official name is supposed to have in common with the Klingon language. Poor Mark Okrand – invents an entire language, and the whole franchise fucking ignores him!)

It’s not like Enterprise gave a fuck about external or even internal consistancy

For years, by the time I’m done reading the comments, everything has been said so I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned the similarities with Carlos Castañeda (the teachings of don Juan), Dan millman (the peaceful warrior) and the celestine prophecy (can’t remember the author). All these guys are making money from their books as well.

yup, and the UC system even changed their rules regarding publication of thesis work after Castaneda took them for a ride.

He lied about everything.

even where he went to do the work.

IIRC, he plagiarized the work of another anthropology researcher, then made up a fictional tribe and said it was this tribe he spent 2 years working with. This, from a buddy of mine who was a grad student in anthropology shortly after Castenada, and happened to end up having one of the same advisers.

I remember how shocked I was when I first learned about that.

I remember reading his books when I was a teen, and becoming keen to try out some experiments with peyote….

I got into Castaneda a little bit during college, myself. There was a brief period of a couple of months after I left the church of my childhood where I got into a lot of weird alternative beliefs and was also doing hallucinogens for the first time.

I read a bit of Teachings of Don Juan and got pretty excited about all the amazing powers I was going to activate the next time I ate shrooms; I never could figure out the Crouching Tiger jump into treetops, but I did hold a cigarette lighter to my hand for a pretty long time once (before anyone asks, it was lit). I still haven’t figured out how I managed that one; I’d chalk it up to my perception of time being off because of the trip, but I had babysitters who were pretty amazed too.

Must be a relatively narrow niche.
I mean, to my knowledge (most) women do not find that kind of hardcore stuff attractive.
On the other hand, 7-10% of 3.5 billion-it adds up.And if you count the repressed midwestern priests who consume most of the stuff…

The other dimensions I write about, that Paul Dirac postulated (1930) exist as antiparticle worlds, and seem to our perception to be placed at arm’s length to us.

Since I’ve studied quantum field theory, I’m quite familiar with Dirac’s postulate. This is not remotely what he’s talking about. The original idea of the Dirac sea implies a particle-antiparticle symmetry, which was later confirmed. Antiparticles are quite common, and are created and die around us every second. They exist in this world.

Secondly, dematerializing an entire human being would release around 1700 megatons of energy. Not a recommended backyard activity as it would annoy the neighbours quite a great deal. Neighbouring nations that is.

My recommendation for this nut-job is to get a better supplier of whatever drugs he’s on. Whatever he’s smoking isn’t working out too well.

@Merit of the Badgers, I do retinal imaging and research.
INAD: most of the phenomena you describe is only in the literature from the psychology side because they are so subjective.

(Except floaters of course, those are thickened strands of vitreous humour, and blue field, which a colleague of mine used to do. Now we do AO-SLO imaging and see the individual red & white blood cells and calculate the velocity from the frame rate.)

A quick review showed me people have lots of theories and not much evidence yet of a mechanism.